First of all, feeds are fantastic. Dear reader: if you don’t understand or use RSS or feedreaders yet, do not go past go, take a few minutes out of your day to learn what RSS is (one good explanation with a great diagram). There’s many other good tutorials out there, as with all things, just ask your google.
In an enlightened world, Everyone should be out there bathing in that glorious, luminous river of news. But the trouble is many feeds/sites are rather more like the FireHoseOfNews than a gentle softly flowing brook.
This is because rss reading as it is, is traditionally at odds with the web publishing model of most sites/blogs. The golden rule for building traffic is more post per day drive traffic. On traditional feed readers though, this is a good way to see you get unsubscribed.
Google reader has one strategy for this the “autosort” that automatically floats less frequent posters to the top. These days google reader seems to have taken over from bloglines as the class leader du-jour for feedreading.
Also to watch are apps like pipes and blastfeed or for that matter jaiku or tumblr that let ‘you’ mashup/combine or filter on raw feeds themselves.
What I’m still waiting for is the killer Enterprise 2.0 feedreader. One that combines socialbook marking with a killer aggregator. Imagine what you can do with an entire community of interest on a common reading platform. This opens up a number of opportunities for harvesting collective intelligence. Implicit collaborative filtering, or just simple zeitgeist tracking. As of wednesday at 11am what is the tags or pages of interest are most being viewed by the enterprise, the group or your team?
for the record here is my blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thomaspurves.
What does your perfect feed reader look like?
